Rambus misses estimates

While they made a profit of 8 cents per share before acquisition charges, Rambus came in under the expectations of 11 cents per share that analysts pegged them at. Part of the lower earnings are certainly the refusal of a few major SDRAM makers to sign up for royalty payments. On top of that, the litigation fees for Q1 2001 were a whopping US$7.3 million on revenues of $31.2 million. On those sales, their net income was $8.2 million for Q1 2001, which is down 38% from $13.2 million in Q4 2000. Rambus blames the decrease on declining SDRAM prices and costs of a vigorous legal defense. Rambus notes that a majority of their royalties are still from SDRAM. They remain “highly confident of ultimate victory” in their SDRAM trials against Infineon, Micron, and Hyundai. A more cynical view of the whole affair is listed at The Inquirer. Rambus' CEO keeps saying that consumers will pay for the greater performance that RDRAM will bring, but they have ultimately failed to prove that there is any performance benefit of RDRAM thus far. Sure, if you put a dual-channel solution with a quad-pumped bus it competes well with a single-channel DDR solution on a double-pumped bus. What happens when that is equalized? We'll find out soon enough.

RAMBUS(6:48pm EST Fri Apr 13 2001)I totally agree with Lt Cox. I've never liked RAMBUS and it makes me feel good to see that so many people are finally coming around. :) – by Rick C. Hodgin

Corp Jerks(7:35pm EST Fri Apr 13 2001)If the Federal Government does not go after Rambus with at least the same zeal they exhibited in the Microsoft case, I will be very dissapointed. They are the vulturous scum of the computer industry. Any company that lets a consortium create a standard and then patents that standard to demand royalties should not be trusted in the consumer market. Shame on Intel too. – by Mike Knight

RAMBUS is inevitable(4:46am EST Sat Apr 14 2001)although i mirror all of these feelings towards rambus isn't it inevitable that rambus will eventually be the standard form of memory ..or will there be a challenger … – by mrL

mrL(9:28am EST Sat Apr 14 2001)RAMBUS has too high a latency to be a viable solution for anything long term. The only thing RAMBUS had going for it is fast data transfer, but even then it was only on a 16-bit data path. Not very useful for generic applications, as we're finding out with Pentium 4.

RAMBUS will continue to perpetuate itself in areas where sequential memory access is important (video cards). But even there challengers are rising up. There's a 600MHz DDR-SGRAM contender already!

The RAMBUS decline is the only inevitability I foresee. – by Rick C. Hodgin

RAMBUS blows!!(10:20am EST Sat Apr 14 2001)i had purchased a dell system back in december of 2000. it was the first gigahert available by dell. it came with 128 of rambus ram, w/PIII. come to find out, being the way rambus is made, it is point less to use RDRAM with a PIII. it will not utilize it correctly. only when you use a P4, it will be used to it full capacity. that sucks!!!

p.s. why then not buy a P4 then u ask….? because it worthless… pentium 4 suck too. my pIII 1 ghz, benchmarks better then a 1.3Ghz P4!! and then get returned for defects all the time… how i know, because i sell them. People!! wait a few more quarters.. hopefully winter of 2001 with release of Win XP, or first quarter of '02. Intels new ITANIUM!!! 64-BIT INFRASTRUCTURE!! its worth the money. now pentium 4. any comments: oscaralfieri@hotmail.com – by mr. oscar

rambus (12:10pm EST Sat Apr 14 2001)is far worse than micro soft one micro sof does not own (or claim to)own all os' they how every do make and own all window OS' they are only protecting thier rights while rambus claims that every one ripped their ideas off (not true ) and then say that their rambus ram is better any way (its not )

AMD and DDR SDRAM are the champs all the way!!!!! 1 ghz athlon out benches the p3 1ghz and all p4 in most games sofar no matter what kind oof ram is used!!!!

Cost : DDR/SDR. Just observe that any crap Rambus has is 3x that of SDR, and 2x of DDR. Besides, with the new “great” Windows absolutely-lacking-“XP”erience, the 128MB that bundles with a P4 will not be adequate anymore. Solution? Buy more Rambust!

But the biggest part : the Philosophy!DDR/SDR is standards based, good!Rambust rips other's technology then patent it, EVIL.

I thought MS was THE Evil M-pire….until Rambust came out! – by JasonK

I – C it this way .. (2:57am EST Mon Apr 16 2001)Microsoft works for Intel . Intel works for Rambus .. and thats the power that be running my life for me ..

AMD works for me ! DDR works for with everything else .. and thats the Truth .. – by -by 5geeks

I don't know, goats, I don't know…(12:30am EST Tue Apr 17 2001)Did you see that timing diagram on the review site? Made me think.

Ya, sure, the RAMBUS memory has latency. But after the latency, it sure does seem to blow bytes like krazzee. Kind of impressive, actually.

I mean, consider. Even if you could shrink down the TRANSFER o'bytes to ZERO (which is what doublepumped and quad pumped busses attempt to do), you still got the 4 horned devil of DRAM … access latency. I'm amazed, but some 20 years since DRAM came out as a cheap-but-viable technology, it just seems like access time blows goats. 55 nsec for SDRAM and/or DDRAM? 65 nsec for RDRAM? Jeez! That's a bloody 100 clock cycles for a 1.3 GHz processor!

So, in one sense, maybe Intel/Rambus has it figured out: if EVER you can get enough CACHE on the stoopid processor, you'd CERTAINLY want to access enough memory after the latency… to NOT have to go back to the well for quite a few cycles.

Say, get 64 'requests worth' of memory for one access, and now the access doesn't look soooo bad.

Just a thought.

Still, The Hegemony Of RAMTURDS Blows Old Goats. Not a bad architecture, though.